An enterprise architect offers peace of mind
As technology evolves, IT extends further into day-to-day business operations and enterprise architects play an ever more important role. With the change of pace comes small shifts in how organizations use their technology. This shift is having a significant impact on both business efficiency and growth potential.
The question becomes: “How do I get that wide view of my environment without building a large team of experts?” For clients of Ascend Technologies, the answer lies in assigning an enterprise architect.
An enterprise architect is important. It’s why we assign one to all our clients.
We define enterprise architect as an individual who has worked with multiple technologies and has significant industry experience. This can include working with storage, networking, enterprise applications, virtualization, cloud and more. Generally, they also have more than 10 years hands-on experience across technologies. We’re seasoned professionals who have seen plenty and worked through challenging situations. We’ve been shoulder-to-shoulder with clients through outages, implementations, updates, budgeting, strategy and so much more. We have a broad range of experience that we can bring to any strategy and technical architecture.
Assigning an enterprise architect to a client is a smart long-term investment. It’s why we assign one to each of our clients. As we learn the nuances of individual client environments, we identify areas for improvement and resolve long-standing problems. Identifying and resolving these problems increase environment stability and performance. This also results in reducing the support burden on our engineering teams by reducing noisy devices and processes. This enables our teams to provide more top-to-bottom value.
We provide training and insights to our engineering teams and NOC to help them proactively service specific environments. This leads to quicker issue resolution and more in-tuned environment monitoring.
Enterprise architects add value to clients, no matter what stage of the technical process they’re in.
We also provide strategic insights to help clients plan for investments, equipment refreshes and migrating to cloud platforms. We coordinate with our principals, deep technology specialists with a focus on one or two targeted technologies. Together, we recommend potential improvements and introduce new ideas and offerings to our clients that impact their business. We also push our team to develop new offerings based on our clients’ business needs.
We act as an outside check to ensure the business has the best possible technology solutions to meet critical business needs. The team provides feedback and insight gathered by working with multiple clients in multiple environments. We then work with their internal team to introduce new ideas and to help them develop additional skills. There is also an added benefit that an organization can reassign team members to functions that add more business value.
Ultimately, the value provided by assigning enterprise architects to our clients far outweighs the investment. Our clients respect the architect’s technical knowledge and breathe easier knowing that someone is keeping tabs on their environment. Additionally, enterprise architects engage our operational team to provide better service for our clients.
Whether your technology road map includes incremental improvements or aggressive growth as your business scales, an enterprise architect helps you deliver added business value to your customers. It leads to stability, efficiency, and the potential to drive positive changes through your technology.
If you’d like to learn more about how Ascend Technologies team can deliver service to your organization, please reach out.
By Justin Gilmore, Dan O’Connell and Mike Herff
